Introducing the Turbo Invoice API

Photo by Cara Fuller on Unsplash

I’m pleased to announce the initial open source release of the Turbo Invoice API, a home health invoicing API for home health staffing agencies.

Observations, Problem, and Opportunity:

In my experience consulting and managing projects for a home health staffing agency, I’ve found two things to be unmistakably true:

1. Home health software is particularly susceptible to software rot.
2. Innovation in home health is slower than other healthcare verticals.

Combine those observations with a heavily regulated environment and risks associated with failing to meet vaguely defined security standards — and the result is an industry shortage of innovation, investment and competition.

This environment opens the door for open source projects like the Turbo Invoice API, where developers and innovators collaborate on bringing ideas to the marketplace without some of the barriers faced by private projects. My knowledge and access to the home health industry prompted me to develop and launch an open source project to benefit stakeholders in this space.

Re-imagining for 2019:

The particular invoicing application used (not for much longer) by a home health staffing agency I work closely with was built in 2009 and has been minimally maintained for years. Other home health staffing agencies, who were sold clones of the original product face similar maintenance challenges and rely solely on the legacy developers who built the application over a decade ago.

The rise of mobile application development in the last decade and the mobile nature of home health therapists should have made adoption of mobile-first solutions the default option for all home health staffing agencies. And a SaaS subscription of a product to meet their needs would have provided these agencies with software less susceptible to decay.

The context in which this applications was originally built combined with the opportunity to capitalize on technological advancement over the last decade helped shaped the goals for this project:

Goals:

1. Provide a simple API with endpoints that reflect the data that agencies need to compare visits to the records of other agencies it partners with
2. Provide contributing developers with source code that adheres to the Ruby style guide and practices test driven development (TDD).
3. Provide agencies with a solution that takes minimal time to onboard
4. Introduce home health staffing agencies to an open source alternative for invoicing

Overview:

1. Agencies contribute to and maintain a fork of the original source code.
2. Optional: Configure a front end client.
3. Future Development: Access the API endpoints with token-based authentication. Open access to the API is strongly discouraged due to the sensitive nature of healthcare data.

Contributing:

If you would like to contribute to this project, fork the repo to get started!